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Farrell Till

Column

"Journeys to the Twilight Zone" was the name of a regular column authored by Farrell Till for The Secular Humanist Bulletin from 1995?-1997. Given that some articles refer to the previous article, articles are listed in chronological order.

Articles

Our founding fathers established a religiously neutral nation, and a tragedy of our time is that so many people are striving to undo all that was accomplished by the wisdom of the founding fathers who framed for us a constitution that would protect the religious freedom of everyone regardless of personal creed. An even greater tragedy is that they many times hoodwink the public into believing that they are only trying to make our nation what the founding fathers would want it to be. Separation of church and state is what the founding fathers wanted for the nation, and we must never allow anyone to distort history to make it appear otherwise.

If bibliolaters would just once in their lives put aside all of their pet theories and take an objective look at the Bible, they would begin to see that the men who wrote the Old Testament were just ordinary religious zealots who thought that they and their people had been specifically chosen of God. The fanaticism with which they believed this led them to proclaim absurdly ethnocentric prophecies that history has proven wrong, much to the embarrassment of Bible fundamentalists who desperately want to believe that the Bible is the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God. They have no substantive proof on their side. All the proof declares very definitively to anyone who really wants to know the truth that the Bible is a veritable maze of nonsense and contradictions.

In ETDAV, McDowell begins his defense of the Bible with the claim that it is unique. He parades before us an array of "scholars" to testify to various features of the Bible that qualify it to be considered "different from all others" [books], as if anyone would seriously try to deny that the Bible is unique, i.e., different from all others. At the very beginning of my analysis of this chapter of ETDAV, I will concede that the Bible is undeniably unique. Certainly, there is no other book like it, but this fact, as we will see, becomes more of an embarrassment to the Bible than proof of its divine origin.

In his 2006 "Solution to the Jehu Problem," Leonard Jayawardena published a "solution" to the inconsistency in 2 Kings 10:30, which praised Jehu for having massacred the royal family of Israel at Jezreel, and Hosea 1:4, which pronounced a judgment of condemnation on the house of Jehu for "the blood of Jezreel." In 2004 Jayawardena was singing the praises of an entirely different "solution" to this discrepancy. This was the beginning of a debate between Jayawardena and myself on the Jehu "solution," in which Jayawardena was then hawking that he had figured out why there was no discrepancy in the views of Hosea and the author of 2 Kings on Jehu's massacre at Jezreel. His 2006 position is very different from his former one, but no less flawed than his original position.